Fully Automated Shipyard With Sorting Ability
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Ever wanted to have a fully automated shipyard to mass produce ships?

I’ve finally built my shipyard! I’ve come up with a very rough prototype of this thing way back when large ship welders were introduced. It didn’t have an auto-sorting ability or some other cool features like sensors, timers, etc, but id did work!

So after a lot of time I decided to build it again, now with sensors, timers and pistons under my command I could do wonders. The video was recorded by me and Xocliw. Enjoy it and tell me what you think of it in the comments!

Workshop File

The Car Wash Welding system

The car wash welding system is super simple, you literary drive your ship through and it gets welded. Now how it works is interesting. I built myself a full circle conveyor belt, to continuously feed the Car Wash Welding system with new ships. As the ship approaches the welders, the welders adopt to the shape of the ship. This is accomplished by setting the rotors to a maximum rotation angle of 0° and minimum of -90°, also the rotor’s torque is set to 2kN.

On the images below you can clearly see how the system works. The welders cover all 4 sides, left, right, top and bottom, so everything on the ship gets welded down!

The Belt is the heart of the system!

The belt is made out of a lot of small ship rotor and light armor blocks. The surface is covered with landing gears set to autolock and break force of 4kN. There are 2 points that rotate this big belt, and 2 more which act as stiffeners.

Stiffeners are mounted on pistons so they can be finely tuned according to the length of the belt.

Stiffeners

The whole belt

A big “rotor”

This belt is fairly stable and after letting it work for like an hour or so I declare it safe to work!

Now for the most interesting part, the Automatic Sorter!

Automatic sorting is something that came onto my mind as I was working on the Car Wash Welding System, I taught it would be neat to have a crane to collect the craft once it passes the facility. It would be even neater to have it all automated and made it so it sorts everything out. So I present to you the Automatic Sorter!

How does it work?

The sorter has 10 sensors, 26 timer blocks, 5 pistons, 1 rotor, and 1 landing gear. The basic principle is that the landing gear grabs the ship off the belt and places it on the platform right besides it. The landing gear is set to autolock (infinite break) so it never let’s go, the belt’s landing gear on the other side has a breaking force i tweaked so it is just enough for the big one to break it as the belt goes.

Next comes the piston contraption, rotor rotates the crane to the other side lowers the piston again and unlocks the thing. After that the crane resets. When the crane comes to the starting position, the sensor triggers the belt and the next ship can be collected by the crane.

Having a counter isn’t as easy as it looks!

I had to create a counter, in order for the crane to be able to place every ship on the different (next) position on the platform. This was accomplished by 2 pistons, 8 sensors, and a few timer blocks. When the crane collects a new ship the counter goes up by 1.

The “Brain”

The logic behind it in detail…

Now this might not be so interesting for all of you guys, but I will write a short sum up of what happens.

When a small ship enter’s the landing gear’s range, a sensor is triggered, starting the crane rotation.

After that a timer block is triggered which triggers all the crane length extending timer blocks, 9 of them (will explain them later)

Now as the counter is still at 0, only 1 extending piston timer is turned ON so nothing actually happens.

The Lowering piston is triggered to lower the craft onto the platform

The autolock is turned off, and gear unlocked

The crane contracts and goes to starting position.

Now somewhere around here, a counter kicks in, counter pistons are triggered and they start expanding.

Counter pistons stop after 2 second of expanding, resulting in around 2,5 m of expansion, and triggering 1 sensor which than turns ON the first crane length extending timer block

The process starts all over again, but now the first crane length extending block, causes length pistons to extend by roughly 5m. After which that timer is again turned OFF so it doesn’t expand the pistons on the next run.

After 4 crafts have been parked, the shipyard (the belt, welders, crane) shuts down, and turns on a warning beacon!

Sensors around the landing gear

Crane starting the rotation

Shipyard is full!

Conclusion

As the blueprints, 3d printers, and the rest of the shipbuilding stuff is very near (we already have creative blueprints) I expect my shipyard to be completely automated once we get some sort of block placers. I hope you have enjoyed this post as well as the video Xocliw and I have recorded for you guys. Huge thanks to Xocliw for the awesome video, be sure to check out his channel for more awesome videos.. That’s it for today, see you next time!